certainly not about being fine

Right now, I remember thinking about wanting to die standing in this huge crowd of people— and then snorting, because something about me standing at 2 P.M. in stark daylight and thinking, ‘God, what am I even doing here? I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be,’ while some guy rambled on about philosophy seemed….strangely comical, for some reason. I’ve always had a very comical attitude about this whole depression thing, you know.

I can’t really blame anyone if they don’t take me seriously; I don’t know how to deal with this whole mess. A few weeks ago I told myself I would take a step forward and I’d do something about this sickness in my head, and I, ever so proudly, did. I don’t feel particularly like a champion now that I’ve done it—in fact, it turned out kind of bad. But it struck me: how such a mundane feat demanded so much of me. Things, usually, demand so much for me: talking, interacting, pretending. But this literally demanded seven or eight months of me because of my anxiety and fears and once I had it done I just felt pathetic and stupid.

I’d felt that once I did it, I’d get rid of this whole thing. I woke up and I thought, I’m so stable right now. This depression thing? It’s gone. I genuinely thought that I’d gotten rid of my depression in a matter of a few days. I treated my state as some stupid pastime that I regularly enjoy for one hour a day and then discard, when really, it’s a full time job. A side activity that drains you. You are never not multitasking—you are always multitasking, clawing away at the thoughts that drag in your head and trying to go on with your life.

Thankfully, my life wasn’t ruined by sudden bright and excessive optimism, and in the next days I felt like me again. Terribly, horribly me.

Sometimes I am almost sure that I exist in another dimension. It would explain things: why I constantly feel so detached, why I feel like I’m watching the world and everything in it out my body —like watching a movie at 3 A.M. that you’re not particularly interested in with worn out and weary eyes; you need to finish the film because you’ve started watching it. It’s why interacting with everyone is a terrible, terrible chore—surely, because interacting with people across different dimensions, across different wavelengths, is energy-consuming? And I am me, in the worst sense of the word imaginable—me, alone, all my on own, stuck in my own body, never able to reach out or be.

And we’re all terribly, hideously us—detained, confined, trapped, and always, always us. We’re never not us, not living or being fully there or feeling everything up to the fullest color or the highest temperature. We’re never here. You look in the mirror and you can’t tell the hollow from the person and the person from the hollow. You are you, and you will always be, and you will never be entirely here. Not rising to your full state of consciousness. You’re always somewhere else.

Sometimes I talk and I feel like I should stab myself instead. Talking, you see, is always a bad idea. ‘Spill your heart out?’—no, fuck you, Layla, I’m not going to spill it all out and then feel like like shit afterwards because all I can feel is the vulnerability and regret and embarrassment and shame. I won’t show you my cards. I won’t let you in. I present myself like the way I present myself: the two-dimensional side-character. I won’t reveal to you that I actually have feelings (mostly because it feel degrading) so you can talk to me about your God and how these bad thoughts are wrong. Right now, really, I can’t see past anything but this hollowing, and I can’t be bothered to do anything but beg to be left alone. So, please, by any God, do leave me alone, because for the past two years I haven’t been able to find myself in a crowd of people and think that I’m okay, or that I’m alright, that there’s nothing wrong with me.

We all know those thoughts hit you at 2 A.M. But really, it’s not a competition. Actually I’d love to be able to go out in the afternoon and genuinely find a laugh trying to tumble its way out of my throat and not think about how miserable and pathetic I am, because I don’t remember the last time I actually laughed. All I remember is pretending to be alright, to be distracted, but thinking that this is not distracting at all—in fact, you amplified these thoughts. You made them take reign. You made them sound like me, and now I can’t tell anything apart. I do anything and I think that I’m probably better off alone. Just by myself, with myself, where I’m most comfortable. I, myself, am not very demanding, nor do I require conversation or empty talk or counseling. I am just me, in the ugliest and most uncomfortably comfortable sense of the world.

The thing is, though? I’m probably not going to do it. I’m not going to kill myself. Because I am a coward and I am curious. I want to see how it will all turn out.